Advertisement - scroll for more content
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement - scroll for more content
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Draymond Green: “What stopped my scroll this week was seeing someone say Joel Embiid has now officially missed more games than he’s played. It stopped my scroll because I get tired of people talking and just throwing these things out there. What about his health? And let’s take a step aside from his actual physical health — what about his mental health? He knows how much guys put into this game to be great. You’re talking about a guy who worked from shooting a backwards layup out of bounds 12 or 15 years ago to being the MVP of the NBA. What about him mentally? So, I see people just throw these things around and talk, and it irks me. I saw that, and it stopped my scroll because it made me feel for Joel. I feel for him. Nobody knows what he’s going through and what he has to deal with. And everybody says, ‘Oh man, he got the money. He good.’ No, he’s not. He wants to play basketball. He loves playing basketball.”
You haven’t heard much this NBA season about Strus, 29, because he hasn’t played. He is still fighting his way back from offseason surgery to repair a fracture in his left foot, and after months of waiting he is nearing a return that could happen within the next week. In the middle of last season — his second with the Cavs — Strus, along with his sister Maggie Sommer and best friend Jake Wimmer, formally launched the Max Strus Family Foundation. The foundation operates with a volunteer board, raises most of its money through camp registrations and a bowling fundraiser in Cleveland, and directs grants to youth sports programs, cancer organizations and mental health nonprofits in the cities Strus has lived in. The foundation is small — it distributed about $160,000 in 2025 — by design. Strus wants to know the people he’s able to help.
“I don’t want to be somebody or our foundation as a whole doesn’t want to be a group that’s just like handing out money and you don’t hear from us again,” Strus said. “We want to be in it for the long run. Like we want to create relationships. We want to be impactful on people’s lives and be there as support.” When Strus was just making his way in the NBA with the Miami Heat, his coach Erik Spoelstra’s son went through a serious health scare. Spoelstra remembers Strus knocking on his office door. “When my son was sick, he stopped by my office,” Spoelstra said. “A lot of people just feel awkward. They don’t know what to say. He just wanted to offer support. And also said, ‘Hey, if you’re doing anything, I want to be part of it.’”
Spoelstra said the gesture didn’t surprise him. “You can see that Max just naturally thinks about other people,” he said. “So the fact that he’s doing this kind of work is not at all surprising.”
NBA on ESPN: "We don't need any player suffering from mental health ... but this sounds fishy." Charles Barkley and the Inside the NBA panel break down Paul George’s 25-game suspension and what it means for the Sixers moving forward.
Advertisement
Philadelphia 76ers forward Paul George has been suspended without pay for 25 games for violating the terms of the NBA/NBPA Anti-Drug Program, the league announced Saturday. "Over the past few years, I've discussed the importance of mental health, and in the course of recently seeking treatment for an issue of my own, I made the mistake of taking an improper medication," George said in a statement to ESPN's Shams Charania. "I take full responsibility for my actions and apologize to the Sixers organization, my teammates and the Philly fans for my poor decision making during this process. "I am focused on using this time to make sure that my mind and body are in the best condition to help the team when I return."
Former NBA player Kyle Singler made some wild claims in a concerning video on social media Saturday. In the explicative-laden rant posted to Instagram, Singler — who looks visually distraught and disheveled — alleges that people are taking his money, along with claiming that his child is being abused. “I don’t feel safe,” Singler said. “I’ve got people in my life taking my money — this is a message to everybody in my life who has been messing with me. My child is being sexually, physically, emotionally, spiritually abused. Shame on everybody that knows me that’s not helping, not intervening. F–k y’all. Duke, Medford (Oregon), everybody.”
Singler, 37, then says that he is currently homeless and that his child is being used as a “weapon” against him. “I have people in my life f–king me, and nobody’s there,” he added. “I’m on my own, homeless, and people are just feeding off me…My child has been a weapon against me, I’m not apologetic for living my life out of love — being there for people I want to be around.”
Jaylen Brown: “For me, like I live in Boston — it’s a cold weather. It’s kinda cold here in LA too right now.” “But in Boston it’s really cold.” “So one of the things that I like to do to kinda warm up my space — put on some salsa music, dance. It kinda like helps with your mental health and things like that.” “If you in Boston, you should try it. Put on some salsa music, some Hector Lavoe, some uh—yeah, you know.”
In 2024, former Utah Jazz player Ricky Rubio announced that he was retiring from the game of basketball, choosing to focus on his mental health. Love, who had been teammates with Rubio in Minnesota for three years, and then again later in Cleveland for another year, reached out to Rubio because he needed to get something off his chest. “One of my biggest regrets ... is that I wish I was a better teammate for him and other guys, but really for him, because he really cared,” Love said. “I actually apologized. It had haunted me that I’d never said that.”
Advertisement
Tatum won’t be returning to the floor anytime soon. But, that hasn’t stopped him from attending all team events and traveling to preseason and regular season games. He’s thoroughly enjoyed being a part of the team despite being indefinitely sidelined. “Not being able to be out there with the team is already tough enough,” Tatum said. “But still traveling and being with them during meetings and game[s] and practices and shootarounds, still trying to feel as much a part of the team as I can, I think it really helps my mental health a lot.”
Tyrese Haliburton: “Yeah. I just think I was—I'm going to be 100% transparent. Like for me, like a lot of that stuff early in the year was just like mentally, like it was just—I was in a really bad spot. Like, uh, felt like my body wasn’t 100%, but nobody’s body is ever really 100%. I was coming off the playoffs—or the Olympics—where I got hurt at the end of the Olympics. Didn’t really have a ton of time in training camp, um, and I was kind of dealing with some stuff early in the year. And I just—like my joy for basketball just wasn’t there. And I’m just such a guy who—basketball is so—I love the game. I love basketball. I feel like I’m going to be around basketball for the rest of my life. Like, it’s just like—I’m just one of those guys, you know? And it just wasn’t there. And it just took me to come out, speak to our sports therapist with the Pacers, with Coach Carlisle, sit down with those guys and say, ‘Hey, I am not okay.’ Like, I know you guys are doing your best to like look out for me, try to have conversations about basketball, but I’m just not okay in life, you know?
But in recent years when Eli would call his family — sometimes dialing Duncan more than a dozen times before and after games during his first seven seasons in the NBA — they didn’t know what to expect to hear on the other end. Eli heard voices. The auditory hallucinations, diagnosed in 2021 as schizophrenia, turned the big-hearted, caring side of his personality his family loved into a hypervigilant, protective paranoia that his parents, Elisabeth and Jeffrey, tried to de-escalate. As a last resort, they would call in Marta, a licensed therapist, and Duncan, who was Eli's "whisperer."
Duncan said: "The real challenge of that was the volatility. He would call me, he would make sure I was safe. He made sure I was OK. ... And then he could hang up. And sure enough, maybe, you know, 15 to 20 minutes later, he called me again. “So of course, in that stretch, I think, probably the greatest challenge was finding ways to compartmentalize and still try to perform. I always kept in perspective, like he’s the one going through it. And obviously it impacts us as a family. We were all sort of constantly anxious and on edge, but that was never the priority, making sure we were OK. It was always making sure he was OK.”